I could definitely see where a reference platform would help notebook sales. The notebook chipset offerings for AMD CPU's have been historically not very well received, & something straight from Sunnyvale (or its Japanese equivalent, in this case) might just persuade OEM's to test the AMD notebook waters.

"The system is geared to offer more than five hours' battery life in a fully functional notebook. In addition to the dual-core CPU, the platform is based on DDR 2 SDRAM. AMD's DDR 2-supporting processors, enabled with the arrival of the Socket M2 infrastructure for desktops and Socket S1 for mobile, are expected to arrive in Q2 2006."

The Inq's got the dirt on the upcoming socket from AMD. They've apparently changed the name, & will be producing new versions of existing CPU's to fit the new socket.

"New Socket AM2 is being occupied by three cores: Manilla, Orelans and Windsor. Manilla is the codename for new Sempr0ns, Orleans is the name for single-core AM2 offerings, while cream of the crop, dual-cores will come under the Windsor name."

The CTZ insider's got yet more information for us. This time they're reporting that the launch date for Intel's next core, Yonah, will be January 6, 2006, & the product launch will be in India.

"The launch venue is expected to be India. However, we are not able to confirm if there are going to be more simultaneous launches or if this is going to be an exclusive launch. Knowing that the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2006) will take place in Las Vegas, Nevada around the same timeframe, it makes sense for Intel to do a simultaneous launch in the U.S. as well."

ULi officially launched its M1697 single-chip AMD K8 platform yesterday. DigiTimes has all the details, along with shots of M1697-based boards made by Jetway, EPoX, ASRock, & Abit.

"The M1697 has four PCIe digital controllers serving 20 PCIe lanes, Tai said. The supported PCIe configurations include one x16 or two x8 connections for graphics cards and three x1 or one x4 connections for I/O devices. The M1697 can support dual-card graphics solutions, such as Nvidia SLI, using PCIe x8 cards, and ULi showcased its reference board featuring Nvidia SLI technology as supported by a pair of the M1695 and M1697 chips, with the combination of chips being able to support two PCIe x16 cards."